The Seer in the Tower
by meanwhiletimely
Summary: Gellert Grindelwald's first meeting with the Dark Lord who would eventually kill him was technically not with a Dark Lord at all—only a strange, hungry boy.


_He was gliding around the high walls of the black fortress—looking up, up to the topmost window, the highest tower... The window was the merest slit in the black rock, not big enough for a man to enter... He forced himself through the slit of the window like a snake and landed, lightly as vapor, inside the cell-like room._

* * *

 **Nurmengard — 1948**

At first, Gellert is convinced he's dreaming.

It has the _feel_ of one of his prophetic dreams, the sudden appearance of this beautiful boy in his cell: too ethereal to be real, too uncanny to be anything but an unconscious vision. He is tall and lithe, dark cloak falling over the lean lines of his body like a shadow, and his hands are gloved in black leather, leaving only the ivory skin of his face visible above a high-necked collar—cutting a fine contrast with a shock of ink-black hair. His symmetrical features are sculpted to exquisite effect: high, sharp cheekbones and arched brows above flashing dark eyes that glint in the slivers of moonlight streaming through the window, that seem to almost... gleam.

Dark magic emanates from him, radiates off him, positively _crackles_ in the air around him—Gellert can feel it in his blood, can sense it in his bones, and aches with visceral longing. This is no dream: there is no imagining that familiar surge in his veins, that electric jolt of hunger for the magic he has lost and will never have again.

This boy, this being—this Dark angel of Death—has been sent to tempt him, or to kill him.

At the moment, he cannot decide which would be more gratifying.

"Gellert Grindelwald," his Dark visitor says softly—in a crisp, familiar accent. _British._

But of course.

Gellert stands, lifting the silver spell-binding band locked around the wrist of his wand arm up to the light. "The moment I press this," he says in English, and _oh,_ it's been so long since he's had those lilting syllables on his tongue, "the wards will go up and the guards will be called, and you will find it is easier to get in to Nurmengard than to get out." He smiles, and knows it does not reach his eyes. "The one who sent you knows that. He made sure of it."

"No one sent me," says the black-haired boy, tilting his head just slightly to the side—a strangely serpentine gesture that sends a peculiar shiver down Gellert's spine. "I am here of my own accord."

"That is what he makes them all think, isn't it?" Gellert says, still smiling; tracing the runes on the metal band that keeps his magic locked inside of him—simmering beneath his skin, clawing at his throat. "Albus and his pawns, his tools, his weapons." He moves closer, circling the shadowed stranger; breathing in the Darkness all around him. "Albus and his beautiful boys."

"Albus?" There is no disguising the flash of surprise on the boy's pale face, but it is gone in an instant, replaced with a cool, amused half-smile. "I can assure you I am the unlikeliest person in the world to be here on the orders of Albus Dumbledore."

The walls of Occlumency protecting his mind from Gellert's Legilimency fall for a deliberate second—only a second—but it is a second long enough to send the air sweeping out of Gellert's lungs. Albus, staring at him with distrust, distaste, _dislike—_ not a shred of conflicted feeling or tortured lust or agonized affection in that piercing blue gaze, nothing but cold contempt and loathing.

No, he realizes in a crushing rush of... not _relief,_ but understanding... not staring at _him._ Staring at the boy in front of him.

"Do you believe me?" the boy who Albus hates asks dryly. His mind is securely walled with Occlumency once more. Gellert takes a brief, steadying moment to be certain _his_ is as well.

"Yes," he says aloud at last, trailing his eyes over the boy's face and down his body with a slow smirk. "You're not his type."

The boy merely arches a brow. "I should hope not."

"If Albus," Gellert says—impaling the name with a venomous intensity that he suspects the boy before him could easily match—"did not send you, why are you here?"

"Consider me a fan of your work," the boy says, silky-smooth. "I would, perhaps, like to continue it."

Ah. An aspiring young Dark Lord. That _would_ explain it. "Imitation," says Gellert, "is _not_ my preferred form of flattery."

The boy is smiling now, and it is as sharp as the blade of a knife. "I don't seek to imitate you. I seek to surpass you."

The _cheek._ Gellert is half-indignant, half-amused. It has been so very long since anyone has dared to _cheek_ him. "By the time I was your age," he says, low and dangerous, "I had launched attacks on four continents." He leans closer, hands clasped behind his back with military precision—taut and lethal. "I have set cities on fire, I have dueled my way across battlefields alone and left thousands dead behind me, I have been the _terror of the world_. If you seek to surpass me..." Gellert allows the smile tugging at his lips to expand into a grin: the same radiant look that beamed out of every magical newspaper on the planet for four decades, that now lights up the pages of history books the way it once lit up the world. "I suggest you get started."

The boy sneers, and is somehow still beautiful. "I don't require a catalog of your evil deeds—"

"Not evil," Gellert corrects sharply. _"Ruthless."_ The boy's dark eyes follow him as he begins to pace the tower room—a caged lion, measuring his prey. "An evil man takes joy in harm that has no point, no purpose. A ruthless man only inflicts what harm is necessary for—"

"The _greater good,_ yes." The boy refrains, with obvious difficulty, from rolling his eyes. "I am familiar with your... utilitarian philosophy." He steps forward, inches from where Gellert has paused his pacing, unflinching, unafraid: coiled like a languid snake about to strike. "Does it comfort you, at night," he asks, dripping mock concern, "to know those words are still engraved above the entrance to this prison of your own making?"

Gellert gives a slight, tight smile. "It does."

Up close, the boy's sharp features are even more striking: all elegant curves and hard angles. His smooth, pale skin seems to glow in the moonlight. He pauses a long moment without speaking, and when he does, there is a new gravity in his voice, a hushed _weight_ to his words, as if all of it—his visit, his journey, his unholy pilgrimage to this tower—has been leading up to this.

"They say you are a Seer."

One corner of Gellert's mouth tilts upward. _"They_ say many things."

The boy's breath is cool against his skin, but the Dark crackle of his magic is searing and hot. And that ravenous look in his eyes, as they rove breathlessly over Gellert's face, is not just hot: it's _scorching_. "You foresaw it all, didn't you?" he whispers. "The wars... the deaths... the duel." His dark brows draw together in confusion, consternation. "So why did you fail?"

"Prophecy," says Gellert, turning away to look up at his bookshelves, "is a tricky thing." He can feel the boy's hungry gaze still on him, burning into his back as he drags light fingers over the scrolls and tomes. "There is never only one possible future." His fingers pause, for the slightest moment, on a worn and faded manuscript: _The Tales of Beedle of Bard._ "It never comes down to fate," he finishes with a faint smile. "It is always— _always_ —about choice."

A muscle ticks in the boy's jaw as Gellert turns. "What choice," he demands, a steely threat to his voice, "did Albus Dumbledore make, to change the future?"

Gellert bites back the savagery rising up in his throat at hearing Albus's name spat from those poisonous pale lips and says, "You're not asking the right questions."

The boy steps deliberately closer, shadows seeming to shift and curve around him as he moves. "You were undefeated. You were _unstoppable."_ He leans forward so that their faces are almost touching, and hisses out, "How did he do it?"

Gellert is silent a long moment, gazing past him out the slitted window at the moonlit mountains beyond—spell-light flashing across his memory. "My opponent," he says finally, half-unsure what he's saying until he's saying it, confessing it, _admitting_ it, "had an advantage over me, a power that even my own... advantage... could not overcome, in the end." He tears his gaze away from the window to meet the boy's intent, focused gaze, and finally says it. Finally speaks it out loud. "Love."

 _"Love?"_ The look on his face is almost comical: not so eerily calm and collected _now_. The boy's jaw has actually dropped.

"Love is a great magical force," Gellert says mildly. "Perhaps the greatest."

The boy steps back, letting out a _supremely_ scornful scoff. "You sound just like Dumbledore."

Gellert manages, just barely, not to laugh. "You are not the first to say so."

"You would have me believe he defeated you," the boy says, slow and incredulous, "with _love."_

"I don't care what you believe," shrugs Gellert, "but I can tell you this—if you are planning to duel Albus Dumbledore _now,_ you will need far more help than I can give you."

"Why?" breathes the boy. "What does he have now, that he didn't have before?"

"That, dear boy," says Gellert, "is a riddle—" The boy's nostrils flare strangely at the word. "—you will have to answer for yourself. When you do..." He throws out his arms, gesturing grandly at his tower cell. "You know where to find me."

The boy fixes him with a shrewd, canny look, peering at him with narrowed eyes—considering, Gellert would wager, whether to try pushing through his Occlumency barriers to take the knowledge he wants by force. _Try it,_ Gellert thinks with a slow smile. _Oh, please do._

Wisely, he does not.

"When you look at me," is all he says with careful calculation—an undercurrent of menace in his soft, cold voice; serpents sliding under glass—"what do you See?"

Gellert locks into the boy's penetrating dark gaze, and reaches out to place a warm hand on his cheek. He flinches at the touch—magic buzzing frantically beneath his cold, _cold_ skin—but does not move or look away.

The moonlit tower dissolves into darkness.

 _Black waters, swirling with the rotting flesh of the undead. Hovering wraiths, bloodied fangs, stampeding giants. A glittering skull and serpent, green as the Killing Curse. A sea of silver masks, curving as it bows. Screaming, begging, pleading, drowned out by high, cold laughter. A beautiful hollow-eyed child, transformed into a hideous creature from nightmares: corpse-white skin and gleaming slitted eyes as red as blood._

With a sharp intake of breath, Gellert drops his hand.

Nature, Gellert long ago realized, demands balance. He and Albus were matched and mirrored: they met the world as two halves, made it whole. When Albus finally cast aside his other half for good and locked it away inside a tower, a churning Dark void was cleaved into the world, and nature, Gellert knows, abhors voids.

One Dark Lord falls, and another rises to take his place.

It is only balanced. It is only natural.

It sparks something seething and incendiary within Gellert's chest.

This vicious, broken boy is no match for Albus. This boy will never make him whole.

"I See," he says at last, "that they will fear you—far more than they ever feared me." The boy's dark eyes light up, glittering with triumph, and Gellert smiles thinly. "Is that what you want, my pretty, _pretty_ boy?" He studies the beautiful mask that will someday be peeled away to reveal the true horror beneath. "Fear?"

"I want power," says the boy—that annihilating _hunger_ back in his voice. "Fear is a common side effect."

"Who, then," asks Gellert, "do _you_ fear?" He circles him, watching closely, waiting. "Who is most powerful, now, in all the world? Who has the power to destroy you?"

The boy's answer, when it comes, is not at all the answer expected: "Death."

His mouth twists and tightens as soon as he says it, as if the word has slipped out without his permission, spilled out before he could stop it.

Gellert stares. "What do _you_ know of Death?"

Something deadly, something _haunting_ glimmers behind the boy's eyes, peering out from somewhere deep and Dark inside of him. "More than anyone else in this world," he says in a low, hard voice, "for I have conquered it."

Gellert continues to stare at him a long, taut moment, then tilts his head back to laugh. "Oh, my dear, _dear_ boy..." He cannot stop laughing, cannot contain his near-hysteric mirth. "Even if that were true..." His spell-bound hand clenches as if around a wand, and the laughter dies at once in his throat. "Death never stays conquered for long."

"That has historically been the case, yes," the boy says with silky malice, "but I've become quite good at breaking historical precedent." His smile curves like a scythe. "I am making contingency plans."

"Death," Gellert says flatly, "foils even the best-laid plans." Somewhere, a girl with red-gold hair and bright blue eyes is laughing. "When yours fail, too, remember that I failed first."

"No." The boy is still smiling, sharp and feral. _"You_ remember _me,_ Gellert Grindelwald—remember your successor, your superior, the one Dark Lord who will never fail or fall or die." He leans closer, scorching Dark energy simmering in the air between them. "Think of me, as you rot here powerless in your own prison, and know that when I'm finished, no one will remember _you."_

Well, thinks Gellert, swallowing a fresh, mirthless laugh, if arrogance and a flair for dramatics are a necessary foundation for any aspiring Dark Lord, this one is well on his way. "Do you have a name, my _Lord?"_

The boy steps back, and already, his eyes seem to flash full red. "I am Lord Voldemort," he says quietly—adding with another spark of crimson certainty in that unnerving gaze, "Someday, all the world will fear to speak that name."

It is true. Gellert has Seen it.

 _Voldemort._ The name pulls at the back of his mind, bending him toward it. A French name, with two meanings: _Flight from Death. Theft of Death._

Which is it? Does it matter? Death will win, in the end. Death—and Albus.

His visitor backs away toward the window with a final, fleeting smile and melts into shadow. When he is gone, taking all that burning, blazing Darkness with him, the air settles back into stillness and silence, leaving Gellert feeling empty and cold.

Steeling himself, he looks to the silver band around his wrist and presses the rune that calls his guards.

It is time to write a letter to Albus Dumbledore.

* * *

 _The frail man sat up, great sunken eyes fixed upon Voldemort, and then he smiled. "So you have come. I thought you would... one day. But your journey was pointless... There is so much you do not understand."_


End file.
